Adaptive memory: Animacy enhances free recall but impairs cued recall.

Abstract

Recent research suggests that human memory systems evolved to remember animate things better than inanimate things. In the present experiments, we examined whether these effects occur for both free recall and cued recall. In Experiment 1, we directly compared the effect of animacy on free recall and cued recall. Participants studied lists of objects and lists of animals for free-recall tests, and studied sets of animal-animal pairs and object-object pairs for cued-recall tests. In Experiment 2, we compared participants' cued recall for English-English, Swahili-English, and English-Swahili word pairs involving either animal or object English words. In Experiment 3, we compared participants' cued recall for animal-animal, object-object, animal-object, and object-animal pairs. Although we were able to replicate past effects of animacy aiding free recall, animacy typically impaired cued recall in the present experiments. More importantly, given the interactions found in the present experiments, we conclude that some factor associated with animacy (e.g., attention capture or mental arousal) is responsible for the present patterns of results. This factor seems to moderate the relationship between animacy and memory, producing a memory advantage for animate stimuli in scenarios where the moderator leads to enhanced target retrievability but a memory disadvantage for animate stimuli in scenarios where the moderator leads to impaired association memory.

Adaptive memory: Animacy, threat, and attention in free recall

“…Half of the participants studied the words under full attention and half under divided attention. Popp and Serra (2016) found that memory performance in a cued recall task was impaired when animate items were included in the word pairs, and suggested that animacy might capture the attention of participants, which would lead to the typical animacy effect that has been found in the literature. Further, Bonin et al (2015) found that the animacy effect persisted through a memory load exercise and suggested that there might be an attentional component related to the animacy effect such that animate items capture more attention than inanimate items.…”

“…The animacy effect has been replicated across a variety of experiments, including with recognition memory (Bonin, Gelin, & Bugaiska, 2014), independent of encoding instructions (Gelin, Bugaiska, Méot, & Bonin, 2017;Leding, 2018), for picture stimuli (Bonin et al, 2014), and with children participants (Aslan & John, 2016; see Nairne, VanArsdall, & Cogdill, 2017 for a review). Popp and Serra (2016) further explored the effect of animacy and created a normed list of animate and inanimate items where the two lists were equated on the characteristics of length, frequency, mental imagery, and concreteness. They found the animacy effect in free recall but found that cued recall was typically impaired when animate items were included in the pairs, except in a condition where Swahili words were paired with animate English words, similar to the results of VanArsdall, Nairne, Pandeirada, and Cogdill (2015).…”

“…Thus, a contributing factor to the animacy effect in this experiment could be due, at least in part, to the presence of threatening items in the animate list. Similarly, when examining the stimuli used by Popp and Serra (2016), it appears that there are more animate items than inanimate items that would be considered threatening by many individuals (pp. 200-201).…”

“…There is also evidence that threatening items are more likely to capture attention (e.g., Blanchette, 2006;Fox, Griggs, & Mouchlianitis, 2007;Yorzinski et al, 2014). Based on the suggestion made by Popp and Serra (2016) that perhaps the animacy advantage in memory is due to attention capture, it is necessary to independently manipulate threat and animacy to better understand how the animacy status and threat status of items relate to memory in the animacy effect. Further, because perceived threat could also be related to the other potential proximate mechanisms of mental arousal and mortality salience that were suggested by Popp and Serra, the ability to independently manipulate threat and animacy could aid future attempts to test potential proximate mechanisms of the animacy effect.…”

“…A norming study was conducted to create a list of animate and inanimate words that were considered threatening and nonthreatening. The lists of the different word types were equated on word length, frequency, mental imagery, and concreteness, as was done by Popp and Serra (2016). Once the lists were created, an experiment was conducted to test recall rates for the various item types to determine if threat and animacy have independent effects on memory.…”